MediPad
HPCC technologies are a potential means of providing isolated patients with
sophisticated care through "telemedicine", i.e. remote consultation with
medical service providers, remote patient monitoring etc. These new technologies
are likely to induce revolutionary changes in the delivery of medical care. It
is expected that interactive multimedia communication will make diagnostic and
therapeutical services of specialized centers available to patients in
peripheral areas and at sea, at the scene of an accident, in rural medical
stations, at home and on the battlefield.
It is evident that apart from the hardware communication infrastructure needed
to support these services, we need to develop the software environments and
applications for exchanging medical information and animated images in a secure
way and carrying out remote diagnosis, remote supervision, and remote monitoring
of patients.
We are developing and analyzing infrastructure for telemedicine, and prototyping
it in the Indiana Rural Medical Network (IRMN). The end users are seven counties
in Indiana: Orange, Lawrence, Crawford, Washington, Warren, Clinton, and
Tippecanoe. Their rurality rank is between 3 and 8. The counties have already
committed to cost-share some of the hardware infrastructure for the proposed
facility.
We are also using this environment as a springboard for distance education. The
realization of a mobile telemedicine environment requires the integration of
many technologies including
In this project, we are addressing the research issues associated with the above
technologies. The result of this effort will be a prototype telemedicine
environment called MediPad. MediPad is being implemented on a platform
consisting of mobile hosts and a high-speed network facility connecting the
seven identified counties, Indiana University Medical Center and Purdue. It is
being tested in the context of the medical needs of these highly rural counties.